Die Wise by Stephen Jenkinson

Author:Stephen Jenkinson [Jenkinson, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-974-0
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2015-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

The novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) shows that Tolstoy, in the aftermath of the enormous success he admitted and the great sorrow he banished, had been visited by the story of his own death in the death of his children, a story that trumps cleverness handily. His life and his success up to that point had not in his living of it included the end of it, and the news of the certainty of his death seems to have been a calamity that his plans and his religion wouldn’t make room for. With Ivan Ilyich he used the grim suffering of a banal, cancer-ridden provincial judge to craft a name for the intolerance that modernity has for dying.

Ivan Ilyich suffered most of all from the lie, the lie which, for some reason, everyone accepted: that he was not dying but was simply ill, and that if he stayed calm and underwent treatment he could expect good results. Yet he knew that regardless of what was done, all he could expect was more agonizing suffering and death. And he was tortured by this lie, tortured by the fact that they refused to acknowledge what he and everyone else knew, that they wanted to lie about his horrible condition and to force him to become a party to that lie. This lie, a lie perpetrated on the eve of his death, a lie that was bound to degrade the awesome, solemn act of his dying to the level of their social calls, their draperies, and the sturgeon they ate for dinner, was an excruciating torture for Ivan Ilyich … He saw that the awesome, terrifying act of his dying had been degraded by those about him to the level of a chance unpleasantness, a bit of unseemly behavior; that it had been degraded by that very “propriety” to which he had devoted his entire life …. Nothing did so much to poison the last days of Ivan Ilyich’s life as this falseness in himself and in those around him.

Leo Tolstoy (trans. Lynn Solotaroff), The Death of Ivan Ilych, page 103

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